The socialisation of media has made sharing online news second nature. Some items go viral while others get left alone. A study of stories appearing on the New York Times website has attempted to show what motivates people to share news. Why do some stories spread their wings across our inboxes and others stay rooted to their homepage and quietly disappear?

Pennsylvania State University researchers Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman have suggested that readers most want to share articles that inspire ‘awe’. The study argues that awe encourages virality because “awe inducing stimuli also tend to be entertaining [and are] particularly likely to drive people to talk to others to understand how they feel.”

The study found that positive news was shared more frequently than negative. Our Metrica Numbers research shows that more good news is written about our clients than bad, suggesting that positive news is more attractive to both journalists and readers.

We will soon be publishing the results of our ongoing research into the social media debate about the UK’s political parties in anticipation of the forthcoming general election. This has shown that the reverse is true in politics than in the wider debate about brands. There is more negative comment about political parties than positive. This is likely to be because political parties are not just products or brands, despite how they market themselves, they inspire an emotional response in those who choose to write about them. We will be publishing these results soon and throughout the campaign.

Is a well shared story the same as a good news story? Not necessarily. A widely read but not widely shared story is still influential and more so, a story that isn’t necessarily widely read but is read by the right people, is heavily influential. Understanding what drives virality is useful in helping to understand what catches a readers’ attention, though this research doesn’t mean that communicators need to ‘awe’ their audience every time to be successful.

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